Not Forgotten
by twiXlite
Summary: Bella remembers the loss of her dearest friend and soulmate. In memory of a dear friend of mine.


**_I've written this one-shot in memory of my best friend, Rei, who was killed by a drunk driver two years ago on the 11th March, six days before he turned eighteen._**

**_It happens too often and too many people are left to suffer because of drinking and driving._**

**_Names and characters are subject matter owned by S. Meyer. Plotline for one-shot are actual events happened._**

_'I'm so tired of being here._

_Suppressed by all my childish fears._

_And if you have to leave._

_I wish that you would just leave._

'_Cause your presence still lingers here._

_And it won't leave me alone._

_These wounds won't seem to heal._

_This pain is just too real._

_There's just too much that time cannot erase._

_When you cried I'd wipe away your tears,_

_When you'd scream I'd fight away all of your fears,_

_I held your hand through all of these years,_

_But you still have all of me._

_You used to captivate me by your resonating light,_

_Now I'm bound by the life you left behind._

_Your face it haunts,_

_My once pleasant dreams._

_Your voice it chased away,_

_All the sanity in me._

_These wounds won't seem to heal,_

_This pain is just too real,_

_There's just too much that time cannot erase._

_When you cried I'd wipe away all of your tears,_

_When you'd scream I'd fight away all of your fears._

_I held your hand through all of these years,_

_But you still have all of me._

_I tried so hard to tell myself that you're gone,_

_But though you're still with me,_

_I've been alone all along._

_When you cried I'd wipe away all of your tears,_

_When you'd scream I'd fight away all of your fears._

_I held your hand through all of these years,_

_But you still have all of me.'_

_'My Immortal' - Evanescence_

**_Bella_**

Standing in front of the cold, hard stone that marked his final resting place, it didn't escape me that the small grey block was hardly enough to mark his time on this earth.

It did nothing to capture the glint and light that shone in his eyes as he laughed, the pain that could be expressed in times of hardship or grief.

It did nothing to tell anyone anything about who he was.

I felt a single tear run down my cheek, not caring enough to brush it away. I had shed so many tears in the last two years, over losing him, saying goodbye and making sure the bastard that took his life got what he deserved. Of course, to those of us who had lost him, nothing would ever be enough.

I still remember the last time I saw him like it was yesterday. His family had recently moved to Seattle because of his father's job. I hated to say goodbye to him and I knew that we would be together at university soon, but he was my best friend. Who else was I going to talk to at all hours of the night? Who was going to meet me at the 24hr diner on the edge of town for hot chocolate at three in the morning? Who was going to be there when I needed someone to talk to?

I had taken the Friday and Monday off school so I could go and see him. My mom wasn't too pleased about that, but she knew how important Edward was to me, how much I'd missed him and that I wouldn't let myself fall behind in school. It was just two days I'd be missing, and I'd been able to get away with it using the puppy dog eyes that had always gotten me what I wanted. No matter how much she tried to be, my mother was not a rule enforcer. She tried, bless her, but she failed drastically each and every time.

_*~* 10th March 2008 *~*_

_"You're an idiot, you know that, right?" I laughed, shaking my head at my idiotic best friend._

_He had insisted on driving me back to Forks, just as he had insisted on picking me up on Friday. Why he wouldn't just let me drive my truck, I didn't know._

_"Because you know I don't trust that thing." He stated calm and collected, rolling his eyes slightly. _Did I say that out loud?_ "Yes, you did." He laughed, his mouth pulling up on one side slightly higher than the other. It was the crooked grin he always reserved for me. Not even his family was graced with that particular grin. It was mine._

_"Yeah yeah, whatever." I sighed, looking out the window as we passed Port Angeles._

_I hated this part of seeing him recently. It always meant goodbye for another few weeks. Yeah, we spoke on the phone and email, IM and all that shit, but it wasn't the same. He was _my_ Edward and he belonged here with me. Not in Seattle._

_"Hey." His voice was soft and quiet as he took my hand in his across the centre console in the car. "You know it's not for long." Even though he was trying to be optimistic, I could hear the sad twinge in his voice. He was hurting as much as I was at having to be apart. Well, having spent nearly eighteen years together almost constantly, missing each other was bound to happen._

_Our mothers were best friends. Had been since they were teenagers and being pregnant together only seemed like fate was working with them._

_My mom, Renee had gotten pregnant with me two months before Esme had conceived Edward. And the fact that we were opposite genders, well, it made it seem like fate really _was_ working with those two. Something told me that the two of them had been planning our wedding since they found out that Edward was a boy. Unfortunately for them, our relationship never went beyond anything but best friends._

_And I was content for it to stay that way._

_Did I love him?_

_Of course I did._

_Was I _in_ love with him?_

_No. He was my best friend. My soulmate._

_See, to me, a soulmate doesn't have to be someone you're in love with. Your soulmate is the other half of you. The one person you gel with completely, the one person you cannot live without._

_That was what Edward was for me._

_He had told me more than once, he felt the same way about me. He loved me, but wasn't _in love_ with me._

_I didn't need more than that._

_As he pulled up outside my house, I couldn't help but feel my chest deflate and my heart break a little more. Here was where we said goodbye. He didn't come in. He never did. He had a four hour drive back to Seattle and told me that if he came in he wouldn't be able to leave again. Not that I had a problem with that._

_He sighed gently, wrapping his arm around my shoulders and pulling me to him, resting his forehead on mine, closing his eyes._

_"It doesn't matter where I am." He whispered gently, pressing his lips to my forehead before pulling away._

_"You're always in here." I whispered back, placing my hand on his chest gently, smiling up at him. I pulled him down gently, pressing my lips to his forehead as he had done to me, inhaling the beautiful scent of his bronze hair. I had never seen hair like it and I knew I never would again, no matter where I went._

_This was how we always said goodbye, reinforcing the knowledge that we were always there for the other should we need them. I knew that if I ever needed him, he would be here as soon as he could be and vice versa. There wasn't anything I wouldn't drop for him._

_I couldn't help the tear that slid down my face as I watched him drive away, yet again. I turned around not wanting to watch my best friend leave again._

_My soulmate._

*~* 11th March 2010 *~*

Edward had been my soulmate.

I couldn't live without him. I _wasn't_ living without him. I was existing.

He had been the one constant in my life for eighteen years and even now, two years later, I didn't know what to do without him. Yeah, I went to college, I was getting my degree, but I wasn't experiencing it.

I didn't know _how_ to.

And being perfectly honest, I didn't _want_ to.

People around me were forever saying about how 'he wouldn't want this' and such shit and two months ago, I finally lost it with my mom. She had come out with all the 'Edward wouldn't want you to live this way' crap that she had probably read in some shitty self-help book somewhere.

I had lost it and told her that she didn't know what Edward would have wanted. That no one knew him apart from me. That there were things about him that he refused to share with anyone other than myself. And it was the same with me. He was my secretkeeper and I his.

We trusted each other explicitly.

I stopped living the moment I got that phone call from Alice two years ago today.

*~* 11th March 2008 *~*

_"Bells!" I heard Renee yelling up the stairs. "Bella!"_

_Something wasn't right. Renee was never normally this forceful when it came to calling me. I quickly made my way down the stairs to see her standing there with the phone in her hand, a worried expression on her face as she watched me make my way towards her._

_"Mom, what's wrong?" I asked, stopping in front of her. She shook her head, handing the phone to me._

_"I think something's wrong." She whispered gently as I took the phone. I raised my eyebrows, silently asking who it was. "It's Alice."_

_"Hello?" I asked tentatively as Renee left the room, giving me some privacy. I didn't get anything but a soft sobbing on the other end of the phone. "Alice?"_

"Oh, Bella!" _She wailed and I stood up straight, feeling my heartbeat accelerating._

_"Alice, what's wrong?" I knew I was sounding more forceful than I should have but that was the only way to ever get anything out of Alice. If you were soft and gentle, you'd never get anything out of her. You needed to push just to get an answer._

"It's Edward." _She sniffed and I slid down the wall I had leaned on a moment before._

_"Wh-what?" I felt my throat constrict and my eyes sting with tears. "Alice, what?"_

"He-he-he . . _." She started sobbing again and something deep within me already knew what she was trying to say._

_"Alice." I whined, needing to know what was going on._

"He . . . he was hit . . . by a car on the way home from school." _She sobbed and I knew she was trying to compose herself. I didn't want composure. I didn't care about composure. I could understand Alice even when she was wailing her head off. Remember the episode of Friends when Rachel says goodbye to Monica? Think of that when I say I understand wailing Alice._

"_Alice . . ." my voice was nothing more than a whisper as I clutched the phone so hard I could feel the blunt nails on my fingers digging into the side of my face. "Tell me, please."_

"He didn't make it." _I barely heard the words she whispered so gently over the phone, but they were there. Somehow I had known what she was going to say, but her uttering them aloud made them more real._

_"No!" I heard the wail but the fact it had come from my own throat didn't register._

_I didn't hear Renee running into the room asking what was wrong._

_I didn't feel her arms wrap around me as I sobbed loudly._

_I didn't feel her take the phone off of me and ask what had happened._

_I didn't hear or feel anything after Alice told me Edward was no longer in this world._

_I felt nothing._

*~* 11th March 2010 *~*

It was two years to the day later and I still felt nothing.

I didn't care anymore.

Apparently I was that way for a little over a week before I started registering the world around me again. And it was only Alice's appearance in my bedroom that woke me out of the spell I had been under.

She sat on the end of my bed, looking nothing like the happy-go-lucky pixie I had seen only a week ago. She was pale, paler than she normally was and she had deep purple rings underneath her eyes. Her hair was limp and dull, not in its usual spiked arrangement. She was dressed in sweats – which she abhorred – and an oversized sweater I recognised as being on that Edward had gotten from his school in Seattle. I had his Forks' High one on at that moment. Her eyes were red and the tear tracks that streamed down her face gave enough evidence to her tears before I had registered her presence.

And that was when the floodgates burst wide open.

I leaned into her tiny frame, resting my head on her shoulder as the dam burst open. It was the first time since the initial phone call that I had felt anything other than numbness. I felt something now.

Pain.

Overwhelming pain.

And loss.

Standing here now, at the final place of my best friend I still feel those crushing emotions and I can't help but think back to a few lines from the film Memoirs of a Geisha, where Chiyo finds out her parents are dead and her sister has left her alone.

_"At the temple, there is a poem called 'Loss' carved into the stone. It has three words. But the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss. Only feel it."_

Never before had I realised that those words held such meaning to them.

I learned quickly that it didn't matter how many times someone told me they missed Edward, I knew they weren't feeling the same level of pain that I was. They didn't know the real him. Only the person that he put on for the outside world, just as everyone else does. Only when we were alone did he become the six year old boy that ran away from worms again, because they were too 'icky' to be near.

He had never grown out of that.

And now, he never would.

He would be forever seventeen, taken from this world only six days before his eighteenth birthday.

The man that had hit him had been drunk and on the phone when he'd run up onto the curb. Edward had decided to walk home from school, allowing Alice to drive his precious Volvo home for him. He wanted to enjoy the sunshine for once before returning home.

It had been four o'clock in the afternoon and the man had been completely fucked. Apparently, he'd found out that his wife had been cheating on him, drowned his sorrows in a couple of bottles of whiskey before setting off in search of said wife in his car.

He ended that ordeal with a six month prison sentence for drunk driving and a twelve year prison sentence for involuntary manslaughter.

Edward had ended that ordeal losing his life.

He had been hit from behind, flipping up off the windshield. Both of his legs had been broken on impact, along with his right arm. One side of his rib cage was completely shattered, one rib puncturing his lung, making it nearly impossible for him to breathe as he lay there, dying, even at that moment.

The paramedics had arrived moments after the impact, alerted by someone witnessing the accident, along with the police who arrested the guy who was mumbling about 'some kid getting in his way'. They called Carlisle, knowing that he wasn't going to make it, not wanting him to be on his own and he was there in minutes apparently. Not that I'm surprised. They had managed to keep Edward alive just long enough for him to see his dad one last time.

He died in the sobbing arms of his father as the police hauled the drunk, who was still yelling about the state of his car into the back of a police car.

Why him?

Why did it have to be Edward?

There was never anyone as good and caring as he was. And there never would be again. He had even superseded his father in that respect.

It was standing in this very spot that I had said the hardest goodbye of my life. And I knew that I would never have to say a goodbye like it again.

_*~* 19th March 2008 *~*_

_It had been eight days since the accident._

_Eight days since the one person I loved more than anything in this world had been taken from me._

_And there was nothing I wouldn't give right now to have him back._

_The Cullens' had come back to Forks for the service, knowing that this was Edward's home and always had been. It wouldn't have been right for it to happen anywhere else._

_I stood there, completely and absolutely numb, only aware of the tears falling down my face because of the slight difference in temperature as the wind gently whipped around us. I didn't make a move to wipe them away. I didn't care what anyone thought._

_It was an open casket ceremony, seeing as the only damage to his face was a small cut on the corner of his mouth. I don't think I could have handled a closed casket. I don't think I could have said goodbye properly without seeing him one last time._

_The priest quietly asked if there was anything anyone wanted to say and before I really registered what was happening, I was moving to stand next to the casket, placing my hand on the polished wood next to Edward's face. I looked down at him, looking as though he was sleeping before looking back up at the people behind me. Everyone was watching me._

_I took a deep, shuddering breath, looking back down at Edward as he lay there._

_"He was my best friend." I said softly, everyone around me silent enough so that my words carried on the wind. "Since before I can remember, he's been there. In every memory I have, everything I've done, everything I've achieved, he was there._

_"He meant the world to me and he knew things about me that no one else can ever understand. I know that most of you probably think that there was more to what Edward and I had than we were letting on, but there wasn't. I loved him. I still love him and I will never stop, but he was my best friend. Anything else would have destroyed what we had._

_"I thought I'd lost him when the family moved to Seattle and I thought that that had hurt. I didn't think that anything could hurt as much as watching him leave._

_"But now . . . now I know. Real pain. I know what it is now. And I would watch him leave a million times just to know that he would be coming back. Just to know that I would see him smile, that I would see that mischievous glint in his eye as he was planning something, even to be there as he hurt over something, being there as he cried, got angry or frustrated, or even when he was annoying enough to tickle me until I could take anymore. _

_"I'd give anything to have my best friend back._

_"To most of you, you've lost a friend or someone you spoke to once at school, but other's have lost a son or a brother. Me?_

_I lost my soulmate."_

_I closed my eyes slowly, feeling the tears running down my cheeks and I leaned over slowly and pressed a gentle kiss to his forehead as I always used to do. "It doesn't matter where you are." I whispered gently, my lips still on his forehead. "You're always right here." I pressed a hand to his chest and one to my own._

_He was a part of me._

_I stepped back, feeling a pair of arms wrap around me as I sobbed. I knew that it was Emmett, Edward's brother holding me up as I leaned back into him, grateful for the support or else I would have been a heaving, sobbing mess on the ground._

_No one else said anything, his parents, Emmett and Alice too overwhelmed to say anything and no one else really knowing what to say about him. It made my heart hurt to know that no one other than myself was able to speak about him._

_Maybe they were all realising that they didn't know him at all._

_I tried to control myself as they closed the lid, screwing it in place before lowering it into the ground in front of us. I wasn't sure how successful I was at that point. I'm pretty sure I was hysterical._

_I stayed there long after everyone else had gone, sat by the fresh earth, my hand pressed to the brown substance, trying to form some connection to the boy laying underneath there._

_I rested my head on the ground, closing my eyes as I sobbed, praying for the last two weeks to be a dream I would be waking up from any moment now._

_Unfortunately for me though, dreams don't come true._

*~* 11th March 2010 *~*

_Edward Anthony Cullen_

* * *

_Unfairly taken before his time,_

_Laughter, smile and character unduplicated._

_A gift to us all,_

_Beloved son and brother,_

_Blessed soulmate._

I stared at the stone in front of me. I came to see him every Sunday, giving it a wipe down and replacing the flowers that stood in front of the stone.

My mom and the therapists she'd forced me to go and see since his death wanted me to try to give up this ritual I had, and I had told them all, under no uncertain terms, to fuck the hell off. I had lost Edward. I wasn't going to stop. I think they understood that now. They had tried medication that I refused to take. They had tried counselling that did no good whatsoever. They had all but given up.

I didn't want their help.

The only thing I wanted was laying six feet under the earth in front of me.

I wasn't ready to let him go.

I never would be.

He was my best friend.

My brother.

My soulmate.

**_Statistics show that on average 1.2 million people worldwide are killed in some form of road accident each year and that number is on the rise as more people are gaining driving liscences and cars._**

**_Please don't add yourself to the statistic of those losing their life or mourning the death of a loved one because of a careless driver._**

**_Be safe on the roads and always watch for oncoming traffic whether you're a pedestrian or a driver._**

**_It can make all the difference._**


End file.
